Category: These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Oh, hello. Were you curious about what your psychotic grandmother the distributed AI was doing? Well, wonder no longer! Portia is happily causing havoc in America’s airports, using widely-available, mostly-insecure data from wearable technologies, purchasing records, and surveillance networks. You can read more of Portia’s exploits later, especially if you pre-order. In this scene, Portia is trying to create a…

It’s true! Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels and short stories are now public domain in Canada. When I heard this, I immediately asked my Twitter followers if I should write a James Bond novel. (Response was enthusiastic.) The thing is, I’ve already sort of written one — my second novel, iD: The Second Machine Dynasty, drew a great deal of…

Yes, it’s true. Company Town has been acquired by Tor Books. Angry Robot will no longer be publishing it. I explain how this happened at io9: Ashby tells io9 that her editor had left Angry Robot before editing Company Town, and meanwhile the book was delayed — so she informed the authors who were blurbing it that there was no…

I have a real love for Christmas specials. Or, to be more accurate, Christmas episodes. If you gave me the choice between an unknown Christmas movie and a Christmas episode of The West Wing, I’d choose the latter every single time. I watch “A Very Supernatural Christmas” every year around this time. I like what a specific seasonal, cultural, emotional…

Recently, Kameron Hurley shared this piece by E.M. Kokie on the seeming dearth of language available to workaday prose writers to describe what arousal feels like in a cis female body. Said Kokie: When I found myself stuck and looking for the words, I started pulling books off my bookshelves and scanning for the romantic scenes I remembered from prior…

This month, I finished work on a story called “Permacultures,” which I wrote for the Tomorrow Project. This one’s pretty special, because it was inspired by the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy Grand Challenges. Here’s an introduction I wrote (which may not make it into the final book): I focused on the food-security Grand Challenge because I…

Ray Bradbury is dead. I learned of this today via Twitter, and my eyes welled up with tears immediately. My mother, hearing the news, invited me to call her at work so we could commiserate. I came to Bradbury’s work in the third grade, or thereabouts. I suspect my godmother was responsible. Her husband was a fan, and had even…

And you can read it right here! Special thanks to Rudy Rucker for deciding to share it with everybody. Coincidentally, I am now sitting in almost the exact same location I was when I wrote the first draft of this little vignette, way back before I knew it was a novel, and long before I had any inkling that anybody…

I apologize for the lack of posts, lately. I’m wrapping up edits on vN, a process that’s been complicated by a 1.5-week-long battle with the flu, bronchitis, and an allergic reaction to meds. (Thankfully, I was well cared-for throughout all of it.) But to make up for it, I have a new story available (for free!) for you: The Education…

These are the guidelines for Tesseracts 15, a Canadian anthology of genre fiction that is focusing on YA stories this year. I was really excited about submitting to this anthology, until I read the guidelines. (They’re available as a PDF on the website linked above.) Snip: If yours doesn’t fit, please don’t submit it. Whatever other definitions of a story…

Madeline Ashby…

She has worked with Intel Labs, the Institute for the Future, SciFutures, Nesta, Data & Society, The Atlantic Council, the ASU Center for Science and the Imagination, Changeist, and others. Her essays have appeared at BoingBoing, io9, WorldChanging, Creators Project, Arcfinity, MISC Magazine, and FutureNow. She is the author of the Machine Dynasty novels. Her novel Company Town was a Canada Reads finalist.